Episode #354 – God is Behind it All

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow Special guest: Jennifer Wentzel

(M) Hey, John, I’m thinking of a situation years ago, where you were corrected viciously and not in the Spirit, and you considered this from God anyway. Do you remember? (J) Uhmhmm. (M) (Martha laughs.) Do you have any anointing to tell it, because it’s an amazing story? (J) Well, I was ah, I’d gone on a trip with you, and I had responded incorrectly. (M) You responded incorrectly to a wrong situation. (J) Right. It was, it was… (M) And to a wretched person. (J) Yeah. (M) I mean, you were right in principle. You were wrong in spirit. (J) Yeah, the spirit I had was not right at all. I was condemning and I was judging. Right, I had the right vision of what was going on and discernment, but I was going at it out of the Spirit. I was going at it in a judgmental, aggressively, defensive mode, and I was just incorrect. So I came back from that trip with you, and I was viciously attacked by three people. And they accused me of all sorts of things. (M) Yeah, they accused you of things you were, for which you were innocent. They brought some of it to me and I said, “That is not true.” But they could not get over their anger with you. (J) No, they were, they were very angry with me, and I said, “I smell You.” Kind of like the, kind of like when I was in the elevator and got stuck, stopped the elevator. I said I might as well not bang on this. I could go ahead and call out and let someone know that I’m in here. But the fact is is that, “I smell You God, You’re here.” So I smelled God in the dealing with these people coming and bringing… (M) Really, highly emotional and angry injustice. (J0 Yeah, absolutely. Ok, so I just bowed. I just said, “Ok God, You’re on this, and I could stand up and be…” You know it’s like the blog-post that I said I could either be right here, you know, and I’ll die on that ‘rightness.’ If I, if I stand up and say, “But this is not right,” I would die on the details, basically on that thing. If I said, “But I didn’t do this, this and this,” I would have, I would have died, period. But because I allowed the Spirit to confront me and the Spirit to check my heart, then it wasn’t about details. And that’s one thing I can see about correction is that God will sometimes use correction and accuse you of something that you can wiggle out of. Legally you can say, “But that wasn’t what I did. That wasn’t my motive. I was doing ‘this’.” But you’ll die on the details, you’ll lose the spirit of the correction, and you will not come out of it. So anyway, I bowed at this point and I said, “You’re here, and You’re confronting me.” And He did. And I allowed it to rack me, and it was awful. But then basically when I came through with my true repentance about what had transpired, what was the issue, everything like that, then actually these three came back to me and repented and said, “We’re so sorry, we were so wrong.” And I’m like, you may have been incorrect, but you were not wrong. I mean God used it. God used it. (M) I think that’s a brilliant story, because most people won’t, would not have responded that way. (J) I smelled Him. He was after me. He was, I felt His furrowed brow towards me. He was looking at me intensely and saying, “You will change.” And I was like, “Ok, I get it.” And you know, and when I got all around to it I found out that this is exactly what I had done to this other person on the trip, that the lady we had gone to minister… (M) What they did to you, you did to her. (J) Absolutely. (M) Wow. (J) Now, you know. Because, just because you have, uhm, you can diagnose something doesn’t mean it’s correct. If God’s not ‘on something’, it’s not correct, even if it is correct. Do you know what I’m saying? What I’m saying? (M) Hmhm. (J) So, I just bowed, and I just said, “God, please, show me,” and He did. And it was a very, very fruitful thing in my life. And I’ve looked back at that and I’ve said, “Golly, that was amazing…” And then I’ve seen other people basically say, “But I didn’t do A-B-C, it was A-B-D.” And because they’re on a detail they get side tracked on a detail, they can wipe out the entire confrontation and lose the entire spirit of the dealing and then die. (M) And you know, John, I’m realizing too, that was a very complicated situation that we don’t have time to tell, nor would we want to. The woman had asked me to speak with a specific motive, to find a way to discredit me to one of her own people that had become attached to me and was very impacted by me. She, we realized that later. But you kept saying to me, and I didn’t know it, that I gave the message that she needed to hear, herself. She was as vicious as ever you suspected and more destructive than we dreamed. But you had the insight and compassion and concern for her, that she… God sent me in His own brilliance in spite of me with a message that was the very thing she needed to correct her. (J) But I had that. I had that compassion and that insight after (Martha says “after” with John.) I had had my own dealing with the fact that I went with a judgmental, critical spirit. And I went, basically I went with my hands closed and my fists raised. (M) Yeah, when I got off the airport and walked up and met her, you saw it immediately. (J) I actually saw it before we ever left, and it was just confirmed when we got there. I went, “Oh Lord Jesus, we have just stepped off into…” (M) Into the snake pit. (J) The snake pit. Exactly. And everything that I had felt was confirmed right when I… There it is, absolutely. (M) Hmhmm. (J) But I came with an incorrect motive. (M) And who knows? We certainly don’t know her now, and no one could possibly guess who it is except our group. But who knows what that… an impact had on her, which she needed an impact of compassion and forgiveness. She needed that. Who knows what the Holy Spirit did with all that. (J) Well, and, and, and who knows what I’ll be accountable for, for my incorrect response to the entire situation. Maybe I was to bring something in amongst that. I don’t know. And I wasn’t there, so I can’t, I can’t judge it. (M) No, you learned the lesson. I love Frangipane’s view of tests. He says, “Your test is an open Book test. Go and look in the Book and get the answer. And then if you still don’t, if you fail the test, and you find out the answer, then God considers you passed the test. And if you don’t know the answer you can ask Him what the answer is, and He’ll tell you what the answer is so you can pass the test if you fail or whatever.” And so you passed the test. (J) I passed the test for me, but I don’t know what, what I did for her, and what I could have, what I could have been a vessel of. And I just wasn’t there, and so I just trust…. (M) See, I believe you did become that vessel. (J) Ok. (M) In the Spirit realm. I believe you did. That’s the point. You have yours, and I have mine. (J) No, no, no I like yours better. (M) I believe it was a success for her benefit, not just yours. (J) Well, having your, your destiny tied to someone. (M) Yeah. (J) At that moment we were tied. (M) Yeah. (J) There was too much going on in that dealing that we weren’t co-joined somewhere. (Jennifer) Well, I was thinking about that when you were saying, John, how you saw the Lord’s hand behind it, and that it changed from a single incident into this huge sovereign dealing. And I was thinking when Martha was saying that you, you know, that you’re compassion for her and that’s what was needed, and the redemptive power of the Blood that when we’re through it goes back in time and we have no idea what it does. You know, that’s the other side. Receiving the correction is necessary to receive the Blood to cover it. I can’t go back in time and change anything that I’ve done that hurt other people, that pierced them, that annihilated them. And anybody who says, “I’ve never hurt another human being,” is crazy, is just absolutely crazy, and there’s no talking to them. But we all have, and we can’t change it. We can’t undo what is done. But I have no idea what the power of the Blood can do. If the Lord brings me something and says, “Yes, this is what you did.” My saying yes to that, repenting of that as the Spirit brings that to me and receiving the Blood to cover that and cleanse it, I believe it does go backwards and it redeems in a way that I might not know in this life. But I have to believe in that. I absolutely have to believe in that. And so, I think you don’t know what you’re willingness to do the work, to receive the correction, that on the surface you could have easily said, “This is so unjust; I’m out of here.” (Jennifer laughs.) You know? And I say that as someone whose, you know, whose done that from time to time. You could have said that, but you didn’t. And so you don’t know what that redemptive Blood did when… because God is the keeper of time. He’s not linear like we are. And so we don’t know what happened, what exchange took place in the heavens when you received it and said, ‘Yes, I bow; I surrender. I let it go.’ (M) Jennifer, right this minute I’m seeing something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. There are two people that came to mind. Both of them were confronted by the Lord. One, I didn’t say anything, but she was confronted by the Lord. The other one is the one I said I made a very small correction. And both of them were extremely vicious, oh, hideously, satanically vicious. And over a period of about maybe three years, both of them came back and asked forgiveness. And it occurred to me, and I could say to both of them “I’ve forgiven you; it’s done. Yes, you’re completely forgiven.” But you’re making me see, and I believed it, and I’ve written about it, that forgiveness for the love of Christ, because of Christ, and because He loves, forgiveness is the most powerful weapon in the world to set people free. And that’s what you’re saying. And I believe it, because I’ve experienced it. And I just realized that my forgiveness had some impact on them that I don’t even know about, I believe. And so, even those who… We are, our lives are a confrontation by everything we are to some people and they will be offended with you for no reason except that God is on you. That will bring you that repercussion. And then sometimes when we confront we pay a high price that we didn’t even count on. But that too is a challenge to forgive, and forgiveness is the power that helps. And some people have, I think it’s Henry Gruver said, “People have such a load of guilt that only forgiveness can lift it high enough so they can bear it.” And I do believe that. I do believe that guilt becomes so heavy that you, as John said earlier, you don’t even know how to get rid of it or how to deal with it, and forgiveness lifts it so that you can face it. And for both of them to call me was extremely, phenomenal humility for them, and to make it right with me as best they could. So, it’s the whole gamut. It seems like we’ve covered a whole gamut of the chastening of God and the responsibility for other people’s well being. That’s what it ends up being. I am in a sense to carry my brother’s burden, and I am to lay down my life for His friends. (J) Well, look at the one who said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” I don’t want to fall in line with him. So, this has been wonderful. So I thank you for bringing all this to us this morning. This has been really good, and I hope that it’s fruitful in people’s lives. I see the fruit of correction, and I see the Spirit of correction, and I see when it is really, truly the Spirit of correction, the Holy Spirit bringing forth correction and course change, that’s amazing, and that’s life. And let’s just see where this goes. (M) Well you know what we’re missing here in this meeting is Miss Carole Nelson, who would have such rich things to say about correction; and so we might just have to put her on when she gets back home as an addendum, (Martha laughs) because this is her subject. She loves this subject and I miss her input, so we’ll see.

5 comments

“If we would learn to humble ourselves in the offense [as you did, John], we would discover that the apparent offense was, in realty, a door that led into the manifest power of God. . . When Elisha told Naaman to dip in the Jordan seven times, the offense wounded him. Yet, when he humbled himself, his leprosy was replaced with the skin of a little child. His skin became as a child, because his heart, through humility, became as a child.” – Unoffendable, Part 2 by Francis Frangipane It’s so evident, John, Who your focus is on, because seeing Him (or smelling Him) and the fruitful repentance was the result of this and, as Frangipane says, a door that led into the manifest power of God. You’re such a little child! Bless you.

Many years ago I faced a situation where one of my children had been violated. I confronted with truth, refusing to cover and deny but did so with intense anger, for which I felt justified. The focus became not on the offense toward my child but on my angry response, which made me want to take a machine gun and blow up the whole world (because any mother would be rightly justified to be angry, right Lord?) What the Spirit taught me is that my anger was just but acting out of the flesh in anger opened the door for the enemy to make it about me…(again, a repeated pattern) hard but life-changing lesson. “For the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God” James 1:20

another book by Gene Edwards my husband and I just read – Tale of Three Kings, tells of Davids refusal to through back the spears that King Saul would throw at him. Instead he learned to duck really fast and to refuse ( a deliberate act of will or choice) to throw the spears back. Leaving things like retaliation and revenge in Gods hands leaves us free to love our enemies as Jesus told us to. Keep ducking John!!!

thank you for sharing these moments with us … your discussion reminds me of a book written by Gene Edwards “Crucified by Christians” ….teaching how to see God in painful events or circumstances …I read this book years ago and now will read it again … much, much to ponder ….I so deeply appreciate each of you!

Great message! Guilty as charged! Brought to me a person that was in my life and walking in pornograhpy, drugs, control, abuse, etc. I would confront but not in the “Spirit” but in criticism and judgement. How sad this makes me feel. It makes you wonder if it was done in the Spirt what the outcome might have been. Lord forgive me.

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